“I go into a meditative state but I don’t follow a path that people who meditate take, like sitting in a room and getting quiet. It is when I swim that I meditate.”

My parents put me in the water very early, and also had me skiing at a very early age. They put me on skis when I was one and a half.

The moments that you share with a person do not stop when that person is not in your life anymore.

One of the things that I learned is that you never truly know yourself until you challenge yourself.

After I finished the Atlantic swim I said “never again,” but it didn’t take long for me to change my mind. I like to push my limits. I want to raise money for cancer research and to inspire others to follow their dreams.

It is when you are confronted with challenges that you see what you are really made of, what is important to you and what your true aspirations are…sometimes you think that you really know yourself, and then you find out that you really don’t.

We had a close connection in life, and I still carry that connection in following my dream. This is because of my parents, the closeness that we had and what we share together.

I was fortunate to have parents who understood the importance of exposing their kids to different sports, different cultures and different activities in order to discover what we liked and what we didn’t like. They didn’t push us, they just gave us many things to choose from.

The relationship that I had with my father did not stop when he passed away. An example is me doing the Pacific swim. If I didn’t have the father that I had I wouldn’t be doing this.